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Why do I see a duplicate content errors when rel="canonical" tag is present

I was reviewing my first Moz crawler report and noticed the crawler returned a bunch of duplicate page content errors. The recommendations to correct this issue are to either put a 301 redirect on the duplicate URL or use the rel="canonical" tag so Google knows which URL I view as the most important and the one that should appear in the search results. However, after poking around the source code I noticed all of the pages that are returning duplicate content in the eyes of the Moz crawler already have the rel="canonical" tag.

Does the Moz crawler simply not catch whether that tag is being used? If I have that tag in place, is there anything else I need to do in order to get that error to stop showing up in the Moz crawler report?

5 Responses

is the rel canonical pointing to the right page or are they all just pointing to themselves?

A lot of times Wordpress or similar creation tools will drop a canonical tag on each page that points to itself. What you need to do is ensure that the duplicated page is pointing to the one you want indexed...

If you cut and paste an example in here perhaps we can be more helpful.

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